Wii U’s Next Firmware Update Dramatically Improves UI Speed

One of the biggest complaints with the Wii U is the speed of menu navigation. Moving from area to area is a drag, with even the settings menu taking time to load in.

It looks like an April firmware update is set to address this issue, with Nintendo releasing the video below to show the difference in time when moving from a game back to the system’s main menu.

While it’s hardly the speediest, it’s certainly faster than what’s there now. It would be nice if they showed other menu transitions too, without those it’s hard to tell just how broad this update will be.

Regardless, it’s good to see Nintendo addressing one of the big issues with the Wii U’s software, and hopefully there’ll be more performance improvements to come.

6 Comments

  1. Woav that’s actually a huge difference, good to see they are fixing some of the annoying bugs. This should mean when I pick one up later this year or early next year, depending on when the next Mario game is out, it should be alright to use :P

    • Yeah, massive improvement, but it still seems very slow. Pressing the ‘PS’ button on our blessed aging black beasts seems to get a quicker response, you could be in the trophy list before that Wii U menu has loaded.

      • And the Wii U has a gig of memory dedicated to the OS…

      • I don’t know… if you quit out a game, iPlayer or something it still takes a while, it’s probably just about acceptable but coming from the store is a nightmare… and this is after 7 years of updates.

        Good to hear them declare war on ‘load times’ with the PS4 though, hopefully they follow through on that.

      • @Cc
        What do you mean “coming from the store”? Because I can exit the PS store and have things work real quick. It’s entering it that takes far too long for me.

  2. It’s good news – though I’ve never found the loading times particularly prohibitive…

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